My Other Blogs

Sunday, 25 May 2014

I've done it! I've taken the first step - or can it be called a
giant leap? I have been researching my own family tree for 37 years,
and now I am moving to another level.

Today I became a member of the Guild of One-Name Studies
and registered the surname MURCH as the one I am going to research -
possibly for the next 37 years. Oh, that doesn't mean I am going to
ignore the names in my own ancestry, but this is branching out in a
different way.

A One-Name Study studies - well, one name. Not a
given name like John or Elizabeth, but a surname. And it doesn't limit
itself to one place, either, such as all the John MURCHes in a tiny
village in a corner of one county in one country. No, I will be looking
for MURCHes everywhere - and I mean everywhere. As in 'worldwide'
everywhere.

Monday, 5 May 2014

I found this year's A-Z Challenge (2014) to be the most enjoyable. Not just because of the theme I chose, but because I adopted a different strategy to the other 2 years I have been involved. It had been suggested to me before - but, this time, I did it!

The strategy: Although we had Sundays 'off', I chose to use Sunday afternoons to write all the posts for the coming week and schedule them ahead of time. They were short posts, and I found that, although pictures are pretty, they tend to make the post look horrendously long and you give up reading after one scroll-down. So mine were short and sweet text-only - and I don't think that any readers were put off because there were no pictures!

Scheduling posts ahead of time meant that I could use the time each day to go and visit other people's blogs. This is something I failed at miserably in years gone past. But this time, I managed to visit and leave comments and read comments on my own blog and reply to those comments. I really felt as though I was participating, rather than 'oh-gosh-I've-got-to-find-the-time-to-write-yet-ANOTHER-post' and 'thank-goodness-it's-over' on April 30. In fact, on April 30 2014, I felt energised!

The only thing I would say that I found to be awkward was reading people's comments on my own blog, then going to visit them. There was VERY often no link, so either I clicked on their name, on their profile, on their 'My Blogs' - or went back to the A-Z Challenge site, found them in the linky list, clicked on them -aaargh! So many clicks! So little time! So little patience! It should be a rule that everybody makes their own hyperlinked signature, such as
My blog is at <a href=http://genwestuk.blogspot.co.uk/>GenWestUK</a>

It's easy enough to do, and encourages bloggers to go and visit, as all they have to do is click once, and they're there.

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I live in the Southwest of England. I write children's books in my spare time; in my other spare time I author blogs on genealogy, Star Trek and writing. In my other other spare time I study and work on genealogy on WikiTree.